Improving Aircraft Protection During Airport Ground Operations With Low SWaP Radar Sensing

As air traffic continues to grow, Air Traffic Controllers and pilots must manage increasingly complex scenarios during airport ground operations. Ensuring safety of personnel, passengers and infrastructures during these critical phases requires developing innovative surveillance solutions tailored for the airport surface. This paper addresses this challenge by presenting an experimental dataset collected by low SWaP radars and visual cameras in an airport environment, and discusses preliminary target detection results based on radar data processing. The deployed setup includes two compact radars, originally designed for automotive and Detect and Avoid applications, installed at the Capodichino airport in Napoli (Italy) to monitor different critical areas. The analyses, conducted by processing radar measurements and using visual data and ADS-B benchmarks, demonstrates the feasibility of using such sensors for airport-surface monitoring, enabling the detection of aircraft, and other relevant targets, during landing/take-off, taxiing, and apron maneuvers.